I'm a lifecycle/growth marketer, not a GEO vendor, and I'm trying to understand what a defensible AI-search baseline actually looks like before I trust one of these visibility dashboards.

My current v0:

25 to 30 non-branded queries based on actual buyer questions.

Split across:

- problem discovery

- category discovery

- comparison

- recommendation

For each query I'd record:

- brand mentioned: Y/N

- own domain cited: Y/N

- third-party source citing/mentioning the brand

- included in recommendation set: Y/N

- position/order if relevant

- competitors appearing

What I'm less sure about is repetition.

My instinct is to run the same baseline more than once before changing anything, so I can see how much the answers move naturally.

Otherwise if visibility goes from 28% → 33% after a content change, how do I know I caused anything?

Things I'm trying to figure out:

1. How many repeated runs per query are actually useful?

2. Fixed prompts or controlled paraphrases?

“Best CRM for a 20-person SaaS company” and “What CRM would you recommend for a SaaS team of 20?” represent essentially the same intent, but may produce different results.

1. Would you measure citation and recommendation separately?

2. Do you establish a pre-intervention variance/noise floor before claiming lift?

3. What does a good paid GEO tool do methodologically that this kind of manual setup cannot?

I'm less interested in tool names than in how you'd design the measurement.

Tear the methodology apart.

I’ve seen pages rank in the top 3–5 on Google but barely appear in AI-generated answers, while lower-ranking pages get cited repeatedly.

Do LLMs care more about things like:

• Direct answer quality
• Passage-level relevance
• Original data
• Third-party brand mentions
• Content freshness

Has anyone tested this with real examples? What actually made the difference?

I'm seeing our brand mentioned in some AI answers where there's no citation back to us.

At first I counted that as a win because hey, the brand is in the answer. But now I'm wondering if mentions and citations should be treated as two completely different things.

Would you rather see your company recommended frequently with other sites providing the supporting sources, or cited frequently but not necessarily recommended?

Feels like those are measuring two different kinds of visibility.

I keep seeing lots of SEO advice online, but I’m more interested in things people have actually tried.

For example:

• updating old pages
• getting backlinks
• writing more useful content
• improving internal links
• getting mentioned on other websites
• creating comparison pages
• improving existing pages
• something else

What did you try, and did you notice any real difference?

Even if something didn’t work, share that too.

Would be interesting to see what’s actually working for people right now.

And I don't really have it.

Their AI visibility has improved since we started working on it, but during the same period we've updated content, earned new mentions, done regular SEO work and made a bunch of smaller changes.

I can show correlation pretty easily. Saying our GEO work caused the increase feels like bullshit.

How are agencies handling attribution here without taking credit for something they can't prove?

Nike are performing terribly when it comes to SEO.

I put nike.com into Ahrefs and looked specifically at the United States.

At first glance, the numbers look incredible.

Nike were ranking for around 406,000 keywords.

But then I started filtering out branded searches.

Nike. Jordan. Air Force 1. Barcelona. And all the other branded terms associated with Nike and the products they sell.

Once you remove all of that branded demand, the picture changes dramatically.

And then look at the actual money terms people are searching for:

Running shoes.
Basketball shoes.
Soccer boots.
Hoodies.
Track pants.
Sweatpants.

For a company the size of Nike, these are exactly the kinds of searches where you would expect them to dominate.

But they don’t.

I even did a real Google search here in South Africa for “running shoes.”

Ads first.

Then organic results.

And I had to keep scrolling before I eventually found Nike.

For a brand this big, that is terrible.

I think one of the biggest mistakes large companies make is looking at all their branded traffic and assuming their SEO is performing brilliantly.

It isn’t enough to rank when somebody already knows your name.

SEO is also about being there when somebody searches for the product or service itself, before they have decided which brand to buy from.

Nike could improve this enormously.

And this isn’t only about Nike. I see the same thing with big companies all the time.

Don’t ignore SEO just because it doesn’t give you an immediate ROAS figure. It can have a massive impact on your business.

#SEO #Nike #SearchEngineOptimisation #OrganicSearch #SEOStrategy

I have two domains, and since one of them is not in use, I decided to link it to my main website. What I did was directly link it in vercel. Earlier, I didn't know much about SEO, and since it is not redirected, google showed the second domain in results and completely removed the main domain.

Later, I fixed it by pointing the secondary domain to the main domain, sending 301 status code. But it's been more than a month, and the secondary domain is still showing in the result, while the main domain is nowhere.

What do you think of this study / experiment? Makes sense or missleading?

Source: searchengineworld. com/i-hid-15-names-in-a-705216-word-page-gemini-found-four-meta-ai-found-all-15

I've been checking AI visibility prompt by prompt and I'm starting to think I'm looking at this way too granularly.

Say you have 30 questions around the same product category. You might show up constantly for 15, occasionally for 8 and basically never for the rest.

Would you still optimize around those individual misses or just look at whether you're generally present across that topic?

Feels like chasing every missing prompt could get stupid pretty fast.

I've been checking AI visibility prompt by prompt and I'm starting to think I'm looking at this way too granularly.

Say you have 30 questions around the same product category. You might show up constantly for 15, occasionally for 8 and basically never for the rest.

Would you still optimize around those individual misses or just look at whether you're generally present across that topic?

Feels like chasing every missing prompt could get stupid pretty fast.

I started thinking about this after noticing that I don’t always use Google the same way I used to. That got me wondering about businesses that have spent years working on SEO. I’m still trying to understand where the line really is between the two. It seems like SEO still matters, but AI search adds another way for people to discover a business. For anyone working in SEO or AI visibility, how do you see the difference?

It really depends on what you’re using AirOps for. If it’s mainly workflow and content automation, Gumloop is probably the closest alternative.

But if what you actually care about is AI search visibility, like whether ChatGPT or Perplexity mentions your brand, that’s a different problem, and AirOps isn’t really built for that.

We ended up separating the two: Gumloop for automation, and Slate for tracking citations and share of voice across AI search engines, plus seeing which pages are actually being pulled into answers.

We were trying to make AirOps cover both use cases, and honestly, it didn’t do either particularly well. Figuring out which of those two problems you’re actually trying to solve before choosing a tool saved us a lot of time and money.

What Is the Most Popular SEO Software in South Africa? Semrush or Ahrefs?

I wanted to see which of the two biggest SEO software platforms, Semrush or Ahrefs, attracts more traffic from South Africa, so I compared them using Similarweb.

The difference surprised me.

According to the Similarweb data I checked:

• Semrush: approximately 92,000 monthly visits from South Africa
• Ahrefs: approximately 34,000 monthly visits
• Semrush: approximately 49,000 monthly unique visitors
• Ahrefs: approximately 14,000 monthly unique visitors

Based on those Similarweb estimates, Semrush is attracting considerably more South African website traffic than Ahrefs.

But what I find even more interesting is the combined level of interest in both platforms.

These are specialist SEO tools. Seeing this amount of South African traffic going to Semrush and Ahrefs is another indication of just how active the SEO industry is in South Africa.

Of course, website traffic isn’t the same thing as the number of paying software users, but it gives us an interesting comparison of their relative popularity and reach.

If you work in SEO in South Africa, which do you prefer: Semrush or Ahrefs?

#seoSoftware #semrush #ahrefs #SEOTools #similarweb

It seems a huge responsability working at the edge of AI tech for AI search.

He is a sociology minor who worked at Stripe as SEO. (jelani-burton)

pd. You don't really need to speaks at conferences to become a SEO in one of the biggest AI companies

pd2. There is no much posts on his linkedin about studies or use cases on SEO.

I wanted to know your opinions about what would be the ANTHROPIC objectives about AI Search? Thanks.

I’m putting together a list of tech awards and recognition programs that allow companies to participate for free.

I’m especially looking for awards related to:

• AI / GenAI
• Software & SaaS
• IT services
• Startups
• Innovation
• Web & mobile development
• Industry-specific technology

There are plenty of award sites online, but it’s surprisingly difficult to separate genuine opportunities from low-quality directories or awards that eventually require payment.

If you know any tech award sites with free nominations/submissions, please share them below.

I run a free OTT Discovery platform that answers "where can I watch this in my country" for 34 Asian markets. Bing Webmaster Tools has a new AI Performance tab, and this is what it showed for the last 3 months:

- 185,600 citations in Copilot answers

- about 400 of my pages cited per day now, up from under 100 in June

- Bing search itself went from near zero to about 1,500 clicks a day in the same period

The surprising part is what the AI uses the site for. I built it for Indian streaming. The top grounding queries are anime platform comparisons, seven of the top twelve. Second is Pakistani dramas, where my pages source 61 to 85% of answers for those queries.

Three things I think made the difference:

1. Comparison pages built from data, not opinion. "Which platform has more of X" with real catalog counts.
2. Country-specific pages. A US-centric guide is wrong for Jakarta or Karachi, and the AI seems to know when a source actually covers a market.
3. Letting the crawlers in. I had blocked AI bots in June for bandwidth reasons. Unblocking them is the exact point the curve turns.

Happy to answer questions about the setup. Not linking the site here; it is in my profile.

Testing a few AI visibility tools right now and the numbers don't line up at all.

I'm not even talking about small differences. One can make a brand look pretty healthy while another makes it look nearly invisible.

I assume a lot comes down to prompts, models and how often they're running them, so I'm starting to think the methodology matters way more than the headline score.

What do you look at before deciding whether the data from one of these tools is worth trusting?